A decade ago, Donald Glover said, “You’ve got to build a bigger world. I’m not gonna make [just] an album; I’m gonna make an album, I’m gonna make the roll out dope, I’m gonna make the movie with it dope, I’m gonna make everything dope. I’m gonna make a world.” This approach is what led to the transmedia project, Because the Internet.

This was also catching on in the marketing world. It’s what Tommy Walker used to tell me when I worked for him at Shopify; we were constantly trying to build a world that ecommerce entrepreneurs would want to spend time in. Here’s a piece from around that time, in which Tommy compares his approach to marketing like a television network; inevitably, we also started talking about building a universe of content and tying all of our work together. More recently, Alex Danco writes, “Everyone’s job is world-building, even if they don’t realize it.” 

Just a few weeks ago, Eve Peyser writes in the New York Times:

Among professionals, however, mood boards have become passé, a relic of a previous era where branding was defined much more narrowly. “Twenty years ago, a brand was really just an icon and colors,” said Borzou Azabdaftari, 43, the founder and chief executive of NickelBronx, a digital agency that focuses on branding. “As the word ‘brand’ has evolved to include everything from the tone of your content to the kind of music you play at your store or restaurant to the kind of art you have up, creating a more comprehensive brand world has become much more important. They become living, breathing documents that can change and evolve.”

It takes a while for ideas to spread; a decade in and the world building language and approach is finally catching on. There’s also a great forum on world building, more targeted to artists and writers, that’s probably a great resource for marketers to think about.

See also the fictional brands archive.